The Belly of the Beast
by Anon E. Mouse
Summary: "My sister believes she has discovered the worst. What could be more terrible than her brother contracting the wolf's malady, more shameful than a Valerious bent low in service to the Count? But she doesn't know the most horrible secret of all, that I love the beast; she does not know that the animal is glorious." The education of the wolfman by Count Dracula. Please R&R!


**SOOOO, YEAH, THIS HAPPENED.** **Velkan was always going to have his turn eventually, but he decided that "eventually" was today. It's a bit rude of him, really, to come barging in like this when I ought to be updating TTSWT (or, you know, actually _working_ ), but he insisted and wore me down. **

**This feels both very different from everything else I've written and very similar. It's certainly more...extreme is, I guess, the word I'm looking for. But I really hope you'll like it. Writing it felt** _ **very**_ **decadent and indulgent—I am, after all, dealing with appetites—and I had a** _ **lot**_ **of fun.**

 **This one goes out to the lovely** **Remember** **, who gave me a poke, and, above all, to the divine** **Valeska Vampire Queen** **, who so generously and expertly critiqued a draft.**

*As always, playlists of music I listened to while writing are posted on my profile page.

 _**Rated "T" for violence, sexual content, and suggestive themes._

 **I hope you will read, enjoy, and REVIEW!** (werewolf puppy eyes, pretty please…)

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 ** _~The Belly of the Beast~_  
**

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 **Wolf** (wʊlf)

 _Noun_ :

A wild carnivorous mammal which is the largest member of the dog family, living and hunting in packs. It is native to both Eurasia and North America, but is much persecuted and has been widely exterminated.

A name for certain malignant or erosive diseases in men and animals

Used figuratively to refer to a rapacious, ferocious, or voracious person or thing.

 _Informal_ :

A man who habitually seduces women; a man who habitually seduces men.

 _Verb_ :

To devour greedily.

 _~The Oxford English Dictionary_

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 **.  
~I~  
.**

I am running. And I am alive. Every muscle pulses; I feel every sinew, every bone, every artery. Each follicle quivers; each movement is a conflagration. I am alive and the forest around me is alive, too, electric with fear. The perfume of the evergreens is sharp in my nostrils, the leaves and stones on the ground crumble into the pads of my feet. Brambles tear at my sides and catch in my hair but I pay them no mind—even the pain is exhilarating, the sting of air on patches of naked raw flesh. All around me I hear the panicked scuttling of soft creatures.

I am gathering speed and soon I will close in on my quarry. I imagine it now and begin to salivate: the crunch of bones between my jaws, the wetness when I tear out its throat, the heat of entrails on my tongue. I am tired of the rabbits that he loosed in the corridors for me to bring down and eager to show him what I have learned. When I bring the buck home he will smile and wipe the gore from my cheeks with his hands, his tongue, and let me have my feast at his feet. My sister believes she has discovered the worst. What could be more terrible than her brother contracting the wolf's malady, more shameful than a Valerious bent low in service to the Count? But she doesn't know the most horrible secret of all, that I _love_ the beast; she does not know that the animal is glorious.

I cried when I woke that first evening, curled on rough stones with my clothes still damp and a scorching pain in my breast. The tears came faster when I recognized the noises around me, the slow dripping of moisture, the contented snuffling of sleeping brutes, and a new sound of the tread of soles on uneven pavement.

It came back in flashes: the trap, my pistol, the cliff, the rush of the current below. I remembered Anna's shout, turning my head too late to escape the werewolf's embrace, its great muzzle, surprisingly silky, pressing against my skin. Somewhere she would be weeping too. Was she still combing the woods, the riverbed, looking for a body to bury? Or was she balled beneath her quilts pouring out her sorrows to the empty house? "I'm sorry," I whispered.

I opened my eyes when the air stirred. The polished toes of boots, inches from my face, gleamed faintly in the gloom. A finger came under my chin, cold and white as bone, and drew me to my feet.

"Well now, little prince," the Count said, "let me look at you."

When I made to strike him I realized that my wrists were shackled, my ankles too, and he laughed softly, standing just out of reach while I raged at him and struggled against the sharpness of the metal. Later the restraints will be softer—rope, leather scraps from a broken harness, lengths of fabric and ribbon—but I did not know that yet, and if I had I would have been repulsed. He did not speak again until I was finished, exhausted from the effort and panting from the sting of venom in my veins.

"Exquisite." His eyes fell to my chains and he lifted one with a lazy hand and sighed. "A necessary precaution, I'm sure you'll agree, but not a permanent one. In a few short weeks you will learn not to need them."

"I will never serve you, Count," I vowed, but my voice sounded disappointingly petulant. "I'd rather die!"

"Do not lie to me, boy." He shook his glossy dark head. I opened my mouth again but my denial died on my lips and escaped in a whimper.

The vampire looked suddenly thoughtful. "It seems a shame to break something so fine, but it must be done. Velkan Valerious," he continued, "you climbed so high only to be brought so low. What will happen now, I wonder? I must say I feel for your poor sister, all alone in that great big house, so desperate for comfort that she accepts it even from me."

My eyes widened when I took in the full meaning of his words and I snarled an oath at him. He only smiled and seized me roughly by the throat, crushing my face against his chest. "You don't believe me?" the Count hissed, "the change should be sufficient already. Inhale and see if you dare to contradict me again." I strained against him but eventually the burning in my lungs won out and I gulped down the precious oxygen, and with it came a familiar scent that brought fresh tears to my eyes.

His arms came around me as he said this next part, his tone soft and soothing: "Hush now, little prince, do not weep. Perhaps that was too cruel of me to leave her so abandoned. Shall I go and retrieve her? Such a happy family we would be: I could make her my bride and together we could make a pet out of you. Would you like that? You can sit by her chair, her faithful hound for eternity."

A growl escaped from my chest and the strange urge came to bite him, but when I snapped my teeth they met only empty air. The Count was standing some distance away regarding me with what looked improbably like alarm. "You will control yourself, your highness," he said tightly and beckoned to someone beyond the barred doorway where I could not see. "To do otherwise will have regrettable consequences."

There was a click of a lock turning and a groan of unoiled hinges and a stooped, gnarled creature shuffled into the room. In one hand he held the end of a chain, in the other a revolver that I recognized as my own, the one I had loaded only that morning with a fistful of silver bullets.

"Thank you, Igor," the Count held out his hands to receive these offerings. He let the pistol lie in the flat of his palm for a moment, examining it. "It is a handsome weapon," he said to me approvingly. Then he gave a sharp jerk to the chain in his other hand and a young man staggered into view, his hair matted and his clothes in tatters over a wasted frame. The chain was attached to a collar about his neck that appeared to have been made of a more brilliant material—silver?—and the flesh around it was blistered and raised. It took me a moment to place him but at last I recognized Toma Florescu, the butcher's boy who had vanished nearly a year before.

"Come here, Toma," the Count crooned, "come and tell me what you think of your cub." Toma raised his head with effort and peered at me with jaundiced eyes.

My lip curled. So this was he, this was the wolf that had ruined me. A peasant.

He wound the chain around his hand until Toma was mere inches from him and the boy gazed up at his face in pure adoration. "I sent you on a simple errand to fetch your prince for me," he said, an edge entering his voice, "I told you to bring him to me unspoiled, but you allowed yourself to become greedy." He gestured at me, then, and looking down through the tears in my shirt I saw the source of the other pain I felt, the marks of large jaws on my abdomen and shallow gashes extending to my side, as if the creature that had made them had been pried off.

"You know the price of disobedience," Dracula whispered to Toma, who was nodding miserably, "you know what happens to mad dogs." To my shock the Count bent his head and kissed the boy full on the mouth. "They must be put down."

And without another word he pressed my revolver to Toma's heart and pulled the trigger.

"I must thank you for the loan of your pistol, your highness," the Count said to me as I stared in horror, "and its costly ammunition." He opened the cylinder and spun the chamber before pocketing the firearm and turning again to face me. "As I suspected, there are a few rounds left. Clean that up, Igor," he flicked a bored glance at Toma's crumpled form on the floor, "before the smell becomes unwholesome. Unless, of course, our guest thinks he might later be peckish?"

He laughed as I gagged and stepped delicately over the corpse, careful to hold the hem of his cloak above the gore. Igor followed behind him, hoisting what was left of Toma from beneath his armpits, leaving long smears of black blood on the floor in his wake.

 **.  
~I~  
.**

I drifted in and out of consciousness for the next few days. Shivering with fever, I wretched and wept and dreamed. I had strange aches and twinges in my body, a peculiar lengthening around my mouth and nose, a rending at my fingers and toes, a gnawing in my belly, and an itch that spread across my skin like lichen. They waxed and waned, sometimes consuming, sometimes absent, and I understood that this was the change, the moon pulling at my flesh like the tides. My cries came out as howls.

I do not know whether it was day or night when next I woke, for there was no window where I lay. My limbs felt leaden, even beyond the weight of the chains, and my head was vague and sluggish. There were hands upon my skin, a wet cloth, the tug of a comb through my hair. There was something wonderful about the lack of clarity; I let my head loll into those hands, even when I recognized that they were the Count's. I let him remove my soiled clothes and wash the grime from my body, and when his fingers clasped my throat and ran a razor carefully over my jaw I let out a sigh. Silently he redressed me in garments a half-century out of fashion as neatly as any valet. His lips, pursed in concentration, were red and inviting.

The Count's hands lingered after he fastened the last button, smoothing the fabric against my chest and then trailing down my torso, absently, the way that a man might stroke a mastiff or a horse. And then lower. I knew then that he meant to make me his creature in all ways. Beneath his touch my body shifted of its own accord, half in fear and half in longing; it had been so long since I had known sweetness. He drew closer, and when he pressed those lips to my neck, cool like silk, I cried out.

"Tell me, little prince," his voice was wet in my ear, "are you ashamed?"

I swallowed hard. I thought of my family, even those whose names I did not know, laboring away in Purgatory. I thought of my sister, left to fight alone, and my father, out searching in the far corners of the world. I thought of Ileana, probably assembling her trousseau, not yet aware that she must change her wedding dress for widow's weeds. I thought of the Count, immaculate, straight-backed and beautiful, and myself, a ruined boy in borrowed clothes.

"No," I lied.

"That's a pity," he said, twining an arm around my neck so that he could rest his icy brow on mine, his breath on my cheek; his eyes—blue, I noticed, and bright—were hungry. I was powerless to move.

"You're a monster," I whispered against his mouth.

"Yes," he replied matter-of-factly, "and so are you."

Now that my first moon has passed he no longer confines me to the dungeon but has brought me up into the castle to sleep in his chamber, on a pile of skins at the foot of his great bed. In the beginning he bound me, but now I lie unfettered, docile, and when he rouses me and opens his arms I go into them willingly.

There is so much to learn. He begins with small things: mice, rabbits, polecats running along the grand gallery in the doctor's old castle where the moon can stream through the windows and later on the roof, before I realize that I can jump down and survive, and before I realize that I no longer want to. I tolerate the rabbits—they are sleek and warm, and they squirm when I gut them—but the mice are disappointing. Once a boar that squealed horribly as it fled. Then, stunningly, marvelously, finally out into the forest where there are chamois, deer, and even a monstrous bear that made the Count crow and whose thick brown pelt he proudly gave me for my bed. The men are difficult at first, especially when I recognize them, but I learn.

"You will not try to run now, I think, little prince," he said the first time he let me outside the walls. It was three days before that first full moon and already I could feel myself slipping. I was a shadow; soon I would be a ghost. He held me just inside the barbican, away from the shafts of moonlight that pooled promisingly on the cobbles. I felt the beast beginning to bubble up underneath my skin.

He held me as he had before, his arm about my neck and his nose against mine, his eyes unwavering as they held my own in thrall. His thumb and forefinger, calloused and bare, gripped the corners of my mouth. "You will not try to run," he said again, dropping his voice to a lover's whisper. The human recoiled; the prince rebelled; the Valerious wanted to tear him to pieces.

The wolf purred. "No."

"No?" He looked at me expectantly.

"No, Count." He struck me.

"No?" He prompted again.

"No, Master." A caress.

He lifted the portcullis. My muscles tensed, coiled to spring, and I exploded out of my skin and into the night.

In the woods all is still, hushed like a sanctuary, and every breath swells like a hymn. I can lie for hours in prayer, gazing up at the moon with my chin on my paws. Under its glow I learn every crater, every sea: _Nectaris, Nubium, Frigoris, Crisium, Anguis, Undarum_... The pearly beams kiss my face and sometimes I believe I will weep from the beauty of it. I think he understands, for he will stand and stare quietly with me, his fingers sunk deep into my fur. "I know," he says.

He takes my blood, sometimes in punishment, sometimes because he likes the color. It is strange: he does not use his teeth, nor does he drink it. Instead he wields his knives—silver if he wishes to be particularly vicious, if I have particularly displeased him—with the precision of a barber surgeon. He holds the basin gingerly, careful not to spill a drop, gloves to keep from soiling his skin, and when he has filled it to his satisfaction he tips it out a window or gives it to a _dwergo_ to take away. "You seem out of sorts, pet," he murmurs when I resist, "we must try to balance your humors." The pain is a welcome reminder that I am alive, but sometimes it is welcome in other ways. The first time I understood that the wolf craves this violence I vomited.

Sometimes his brides are present, but rarely. When they are they delight in prodding me with their hairpins, Verona's embroidery needles, and Aleera places jeweled collars around my neck and kisses my cheek (he forbids Marishka). I imagine sinking my teeth into their slim white calves and slashing ribbons into their beautiful faces with my claws.

 **.  
~I~  
.**

It was Aleera who let it slip. Drowsing one night in my cell I woke to hear her some distance away whispering to someone whose identity I could not yet discern. "It is bad enough that he's always sniffing after that gypsy tramp's skirts," she whined, "but now he abandons our beds to lie with beasts! You may content yourself with sharing but I will not be usurped by one filthy Valerious, much less two."

 _My sister, she was talking about my sister._ I thought of the Count pawing at her and, God help me, I was jealous. The wolf began to stir, but her next words snuffed him out entirely.

"Couldn't we just dispatch him? There is so much serum in the tower, our master need never know." Her tone became wheedling: "just enough to remove the curse and make him safe, and then—oh, _sister_!—his blood will be so sweet!"

I heard the crack of a slap. "Have you gone mad?" Verona's reply was horrified and shrill.

I did not hear the rest of their conversation, for the wheels of what was left of my mind were turning furiously. Dracula had a cure for my lycanthropy. There had been rumors, of course, but they had never been proven. The Count had developed an antidote to the wolf's poison. The Count thought something about me was dangerous.

But when I tried to tell my sister what I had discovered, it was as if someone had clamped my tongue in a vise. This was to be my final test. It was so queer to be home, to crawl in through the window like a thief and discover the house reeking of strange men. With the moon concealed by storm clouds I spent long minutes taking in the familiar objects, fingering my weapons in the armory, laying my cheek against my father's desk, listening to Anna's even breaths of slumber. I hid when I heard her coming but she found me anyway—my clever girl!—and crushed me to her with hot tears before I could tell her that all I could see was the blood in her veins.

I tried to speak but the words would not come. I could only yelp as the moon unveiled herself, swollen and whole, and hungrily watch Anna weep until the stranger came in and shot at me like vermin.

He had known this would happen, I realized wretchedly; the Count had known that I could never go home again. He had known that Velkan Valerious was dead and that the wolf was his. And now I knew it, too.

His displeasure was evident. He was in the doctor's ruined laboratory fiddling with bits of machinery and barking orders at squabbling _dwergi_ while the lightning raged outside. When I came tumbling in, clumsy in my transformation and scattering clumps of fur everywhere, he jeered at me and wrinkled up his elegant nose.

I begged him to leave Anna out of it but he would not relent, not even when I swore to him that I had revealed nothing to her—as indeed he knew I could not—swore to him that I would take his secret to my grave. The Count ran the back of his hand once down my bare chest, his fingers covetous. "Do not wish for death so quickly, I intend for you to be quite useful," he scolded, "as you very well know."

While he had been speaking several of his disgusting trolls had lowered a metal rack and tipped it forward, dislodging a blackened object that they let fall in a heap on the floor. It was a man, charred and desiccated, and around its neck was my father's silver crucifix.

Not on his way to seek help from my mother's people, not across the sea, but here in this very castle the whole time.

I let out a wail before Dracula's hand came clamping across my mouth, his furious face inches from mine so that little flecks of saliva sprinkled my cheek like tears. "He proved useless, but I am hoping that with werewolf venom running through your veins you will be of greater benefit!"

He shoved me away from him then and stood back as five _dwergi_ muscled me onto the rack and fastened the straps snug across my body. I was suddenly very afraid, unsure of what new torture he had in store for me and if I could survive it. For a long moment he regarded me lying prone before him and then gave a prod to my father's body with the tip of his toe.

"Did he know, I wonder, or is it just a happy coincidence?" the Count mused as if to himself, though he knew I listened. Drawing near once more, he pressed a thumb to my brow and spoke in a soft voice. "Your name, boy; when the priest sealed you with chrism at your baptism he also sealed your fate. Velkan. It means 'brave wolf,' and such a brave little wolf you are. You have tried so valiantly to fight me, but it will all be over soon." He pointed to the old clock in the corner, its hands inching towards midnight. "Soon you won't have to fight me anymore."

I roared at him and he smiled.

"My, little prince," he exclaimed, dropping a kiss on my lips, "what great big teeth you have!"

 **.  
~I~  
.**

Perhaps I will kill him one of these days. I dream of it sometimes when I am asleep in his bed, dream of holding him in my arms, my jaws closing around his milky throat, his blood in my mouth. Or perhaps he will kill me, destroy me like Toma Florescu when I have served my purpose and his appetite is sated. But for now I am content to let the dog have his day.

The moon is full, glinting off my glossy grey coat, rich as charcoal. And I am running. I am running through a cathedral of gnarled branches, a carpet of fragrant pine needles under my toes and the taste of fresh meat on my tongue. Oh, the beast is hungry tonight! Somewhere in the darkness my sister hunts and the stranger stalks, but I pay them no mind. Not tonight. My legs gather under me and then spring again, my back arching in joyous abandon. Above me an owl soars, paper light, across the speckled moon. I run faster. The mice, the rabbits, and the polecats; the chamois, the boar, and the deer; even the bears quake silently in their dens.

Off in the distance a wolf howls and I answer it, letting loose my song of glee. I am running and I am alive. I am alive. I am alive.

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 ****Well, my lovelies, I hope you have enjoyed! This was very much a labor of love and I am very eager to hear your thoughts on this, so please consider sharing them in a review!**

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 **Note on (were)wolves:**

My understanding of traditional werewolf lore is that they are changed only by the light of the full moon. The mechanics and rules of lycanthropy in the movie, however, are ambiguous. (More and more I am finding that, in the world of _Van Helsing_ , logic does not frequently apply.)

In regards to werewolves in _Van Helsing_ , it is unclear whether they require a full moon to transform: while the full moon is important, we see werewolves when the moon isn't even out—when Velkan is bitten it's during the day—and Velkan appears to be a wolf when the moon may not be full—when he chases the carriages before his death. It also seemed silly that Dracula would employ werewolves but only be able to use them one night a month. Then he'd, what, just have a basement full of semi-naked normal dudes the rest of the time? Sexy but not very practical...

For this story, I decided to go for a compromise: werewolves require moonlight to transform but it does not need to be full. HOWEVER, like ocean tides, the transformation is stronger the fuller the moon is. And the first full moon is critical for the establishment of Dracula's control. I hope that clears up any confusion!


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